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$7.5 Billion Kemper Power Plant Suspends Coal Gasification (arstechnica.com)
romanval writes: A coal gasification plant in Mississippi is iswitching to natural gas after 5 years of delays and $4 billion cost overrun. Megan Geuss writes via Ars Technica: "The Kemper County plant was supposed to be a cutting-edge demonstration of the power of 'clean coal,' and, despite running five years late and more than $4 billion over budget, Kemper was able to start testing its coal gasification operations late last year. The plant used a chemical process to break down lignite coal into synthesis gas, or 'syngas,' which was then fed into a generator. The syngas burns cleaner than pulverized lignite coal does. In addition, emissions were caught by a carbon capture system and delivered to a nearby oil field to help with oil extraction. That, Southern and Mississippi Power said, would reduce the greenhouse emissions of burning lignite by up to 65 percent. But with only 200 days of gasification operations under its belt, Kemper identified more issues with its technology, including design flaws that caused leaks and ash buildup."
In 30 years of power plant engineering, this is no surprise to me. Coal gasification has been tried many times but it cannot pay for itself.
CO2 capture is just as bad. Stop screwing around and get on board with natural gas, nuclear, solar and wind. Dump coal and dump Trump.
Monorail!
"A small town with money is like the mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!"
Depending on the power plant connected to the coal gasification facility they can either switch immediately to natural gas or do so after some minor part replacement.
How many solar panels and batteries do you think they could have gotten for $4 billion?
Just sayin'.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Understand that most of the delay and cost was due to deliberate sabotage the Obama administration. They basically sat on all coal,permits and sent them back with comments at the end of he review period to,run out funding for the projects. It was blatant sabotage, in the way that only a bureaucracy can slow roll things, and completely legal.
I find posts made by BeauHD a little difficult to process. Is there any way to get posts made by Beau480P?
#DeleteFacebook
American lignite is mined in Mississippi, Louisiana, North Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. None of those are swing states.
The obvious problem was their gasification gear was only tested at a small scale before committing to building all (as in multiple) the full size gear in one go "to reduce costs" (AKA the parallel dev that also burned the F-35 joint strike fighter) which means all the problems of running at full scale weren't worked out ahead of time on full sized prototype equipment. If they had built one set of full size prototype gear to inform the manufacturing of the rest of the gasification equipment, and a less aggressive schedule (BUT MY PROFIT!!!!!11lol), it probably would have worked out.
There are less that 1.2 million homes in Mississippi. The $7.5B cost of this facility could have put solar power in about 30% of them.
No the WP only uses anonymous sources to attack the current President for imagined abuses of power, not to attack the prior President for his actual abuses of power.
Doesn't solve the atmospheric CO2 problem though.
Apart from global warming (which many claim is a scam, I don't), there's a bigger uglier far scarier monster in the closet that comes along with global CO2 atmospheric spikes: Anoxic oceanic events. Look them up.
There's also a fairly angry elephant in the room even if we dodge the Anoxia bullet: As a result of the increased CO2 levels, Ocean acidity has increased 30% in the last 200 years (Ph is a log scale) and is far enough acid to already be interfering with formation of corals and shells. This is "double-plus ungood" given that it means that everything from zooplankton upwards is affected and may result in a food chain collapse.
There's also the slight problem of the Leptav Sea methane emissions (look them up) and the possiblity of 1-5GT of methane clathrates bubbling out if they're not stabilised. This is a Storegga-scale event with associated tsunamis and that much methane released in that short a period would have an effect not unlike what happened when the Storegga slides happened at the start of this interglacial ~9500 years ago. (That slight kick in temperatures, ocean levels and CO levels 9-10k years ago? THAT was Storegga and its aftermath)